48 Hour Film Project

October 14, 2015

Last week some of us, joined by colleagues from our sister agency Things Unlimited, gave up our weekend to join dozens of amateur filmmakers to take part in The 48 Hour Film Project. The annual competition is a weekend in which teams test their stamina and creativity to make a movie, which they must write, shoot, and edit – all in just 48 hours. On the Friday night, teams drew a genre from a hat. They were then given a character, prop and line to include in their films before submitting the finished piece on Sunday.

On Friday we nervously made our way to the kick-off meeting, curious about what genre we would pick and what elements we would have to include – anything but musicals and western was our mantra. After being reminded of the rules it was time to pick our genre. “Fantasy”. Some of the team were happier than others with the choice but there was no time to dwell as next up was the essential elements. On the screen, a dancing skeleton informed us our prop was a bone, a scene depicting Jackie Chan sliding down the side of a building told us our character would be a stuntman or woman, before we were lastly given our line, “That’s a shame you can’t make it”.

Now we knew everything we had to include in our film, it was back to base camp – our office to brainstorm ideas for the content of our story. A little after midnight we finally cracked our character and story. After informing our actors who they would be playing the next day and planning out actions for the Saturday shoot, it was time to write the script. 7am on Saturday morning, the script was completed and it was time to start shooting. We hit a couple of snags along the way, mostly failing to secure a key location needed for a particular scene. But eventually at around 9pm on Saturday evening, our director yelled “cut” and filming wrapped! The team gathered for a much earned burger before a long night and morning of editing pursued.

Late Sunday afternoon, our film was complete and all that was left to do was submit our entry to competition officials and celebrate a job well done.

The following weekend, the team gathered once more along with all other competitors at Cineworld cinema for special screenings of all the entries. Then finally, this week saw the culmination of the competition with an awards night celebrating the great achievements of everybody involved. Our film was awarded with best special effects and nominated for audience choice and best use of prop.

We are hugely proud of what we achieved in just 48 hours, it was an amazing experience, one we want to definitely repeat and would definitely encourage more people to consider taking part in. We learned so much about the creative process, working as a team and had something amazing to show at the end.

Thanks to the team involved – Hugo Sieiro, Mary Oladapo, Dan Wong and Lauren Hill. You can watch our final entry here.